The Man by the Sea: The Slim Hardy Mystery Series, #1

By Jack Benton

John "Slim" Hardy, heavy drinker and disgraced soldier turned bumbling private detective, is hired to investigate Ted Douglas, an investment banker who slips out of work every Friday to visit a desolate cove on the Lancashire coast. There, he walks to the shore, opens an old book, and begins to read aloud.

His wife thinks he's having an affair.

Slim thinks he's insane.

The truth is more incredible than either could imagine.

The Man by the Sea is the sensational debut novel by Jack Benton, a classic story of love, betrayal, murder, and intrigue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AMMFA Publishing
• Release date: Oct 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386970552

Book preview

1

The green saloon was parked at the top of the beach, its engine running, puffs of black smoke belching from its exhaust. A score-line angry enough to have been done by a key stretched in a wavering, drunken curve from under the car’s left wing mirror to just above the rear wheel rim.

From his vantage point on a low headland to the beach’s south, Slim Hardy lowered the binoculars, scanned the beach until he spotted a figure by the shoreline, then raised them again. With one finger he adjusted the focus until the man eased into clarity.

Wrapped in a rain jacket over his work clothes, Ted Douglas was alone on the beach. A single line of footprints in the damp sand trailed him back to the rocky foreshore.

In hands pink from the freezing wind, Ted held a book, the cover turned outward. A silver design on black, from this distance the words were unreadable. Slim wished he could get closer without being seen, but the shingle of the foreshore and the wet expanse of rock pools offered no cover.

As grey-blue waves churned and roiled, Ted lifted a hand, and a faint cry was just audible over the wind howling around the base of the towering northern cliff.

‘What are you really doing?’ Slim muttered. ‘There’s no one else down there, is there?’

He put down the binoculars and took a digital camera from his pocket. He took one snap of the car and one of Ted. Five weeks in a row Slim had captured the same pair of photographs. He was yet to say anything to Emma Douglas, Ted’s wife, because, even though she was beginning to push for results, as yet there was nothing to tell.

Sometimes he wished Ted would put the book away, pull out a fishing rod, and be done with it.

At first Slim thought Ted was reading, but the way he gestured with his free hand at the sea made it clear he was either practicing a speech or reciting verse. Why, or to whom, Slim had no idea.

He shifted on grass damp with sea spray, making himself comfortable. There was nothing much to do now but see what Ted did next, to see if today he did the same as he had on the previous four Fridays: walk back up the beach, brush the sand from his clothes and shoes, climb into his car, and head for home.

Eventually, he did.

Slim followed casually, his sense of urgency shaken out of him over the last month. As before, Ted drove the fifteen miles back to Carnwell, pulled in to his driveway, and stopped his car. With a newspaper under one arm and a briefcase under the other, he headed into the comfortable house where, through a dining room window with the curtains left open, Slim watched him kiss Emma on the cheek. As Emma headed back through a door into a kitchen and Ted sat in an armchair, Slim slipped his car into neutral, released the brake, and let it roll away down the hill. As soon as he was a safe distance away, he started the engine and drove off.

Once more, he had nothing to report to Emma. One thing was certain: there was no extramarital affair, just the strange ritual beside the sea.

Perhaps Ted, an investment banker by day, was a closet Coleridge fan, slipping secretly out of work each Friday afternoon at exactly two p.m. to lambast the wild ocean with tales of albatrosses and frozen shores.

Emma, of course, as most contented wives might after being jolted out of their comfort zone by a surprise discovery, suspected a mistress.

Slim had rent to pay, a drink habit to fuel, and a curiosity to feed.

Enjoying a large glass of red over a microwaved curry, he perused his notes, searching for oddities. The book, obviously, was one. The scratch on the car. That Ted had perfected a ritual. Emma had said that Ted had been taking half-day Fridays for three months, only discovered when she needed to make an urgent call to the office. 

An urgent call.

He made a note to ask her, but its significance was limited when Ted’s ritual had been going on for so long.

There was something else too, something obvious he couldn’t quite nail down. It tickled him, just out of reach.

There were other variables he had crossed off. The ritual had lasted from thirty minutes to an hour and fifteen over the five weeks Slim had watched. Ted chose his parking spaces at random. He sometimes left the engine running, sometimes not. He varied his approach and return routes each time, but not in a way as to shake a tail. He drove so slowly that Slim—in his youth at least—could have followed by bicycle. His leisurely drive came across as mulling time, especially for a man like Ted, who Slim had witnessed during other observations driving arrow-straight to work each day, leaving home at a time that left him not five minutes for dawdling.

Whatever the reason for Ted’s strange ritual by the sea, it had left Slim floundering for answers, like a fish thrown out of the water by a stormy tide.

2

On Sunday, Slim took a drive down to Ted’s beach. Unnamed on the old Ordnance Survey map of the area he had bought in a second-hand shop, it was a narrow cove with cliffs rising to blocky headlands on either side, cupping the Irish Sea like the squeezing hands of a giant. When the tide was high, the beach was a rocky semi-circle, but at low tide a pretty field of grey-brown sand laid itself out in front of the waves.

A handful of dog walkers and a family clambering through the rock pools were the only visitors on a cheerful October day. Slim wandered down to the shoreline—the sea today a quiet ripple, the calmest he had seen it—and by looking up at the area of the southern cliff from where he watched Ted, he gauged his charge’s approximate location on the last occasion he had seen him.

Just a regular patch of sand. He was standing almost central, with a few rocks over to one side, rippled sand and more rock pools to the other. The wet sand at his feet sucked at his shoes. The water was a grey line up ahead.

He was turning to leave just as a dog walker hailed him. A Jack Russell pranced across the sand as the man, bearded and balding and wrapped in a thick tweed windcheater, swung a length of lead around like a child’s lasso.

‘Looks pretty, doesn’t it?’

Slim nodded. ‘On a warmer day I might fancy a swim.’

The man stopped, cocking his head. Fast eyes looked Slim up and down. ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’

Slim gave a shrug that could have meant yes or no. ‘Live in Yatton, few miles east of Carnwell. Nope, us inland folk don’t make it out to the coast much.’

‘I know Yatton. Decent market on Saturdays.’ The man turned to look out to sea. ‘If you are fool enough to get into that water, make sure to watch for the rips. They’re deadly.’

He said this with a certainty that sent a trickle of fear down Slim’s back. 

‘Oh, I’ll be sure to,’ Slim said. ‘It’s too cold anyway.’

‘It’s always too cold,’ the man said. ‘You want decent swimming, go to France.’ Then, touching a hand to his brow, he added, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’

Slim watched the man walk away across the beach, the dog making wide circles around him as it splashed through the little pools left by the departed tide. The man, occasionally jumping across deeper puddles in the sand, continued his spinning motions with the lead as though he might sometime attempt to rope the dog in. As the dog walker passed out of earshot, Slim felt a growing sense of loneliness, like a freak wave rushing in to splash around his ankles. With the wind picking up, he headed back to his car. As he was turning out of the dirt car park onto the coast road, he noticed something lying in the undergrowth just inside the junction.

He pulled up, got out, and hauled the object up out of the weeds. The net of brambles encircling it scraped an old wooden surface, reluctant to let go.

A sign, rotten and faded.

On the downward side Slim read:

CRAMER COVE

No swimming at any time

Dangerous rip currents

Slim propped the sign up against the hedge, but it lost balance and fell to the ground, face down. After a moment’s thought, he left it where it lay and returned to his car.

As he drove away, up a winding coastal road cutting between two deep hedgerows as it snaked up a steep valley, he thought about what the dog walker had said. The sign explained the few people he had seen, although without the information being clearly displayed, the rips had to be local knowledge.

With a name for the beach, though, he now had something of a lead.

3

On Monday he arranged a meeting with Emma Douglas to give her an update.

‘I’m close to a breakthrough,’ he said. ‘I just need a few more weeks.’

Emma, an overdressed but plain woman in her early fifties, removed a pair of spectacles to rub her eyes. Few age lines and hair with barely a speck of grey suggested that a husband disappearing for a few hours once a week was what she called hardship.

‘Do you know her name? I bet it’s that tramp from—’

Slim raised a hand, his Armed Forces gaze still strong enough to sever her words mid-sentence, though he softened it with a quick smile.

‘It’s better that I gather everything I can first,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to pass off assumptions as truth.’

Emma looked frustrated, but after a moment’s pause she nodded. ‘I understand,’ she said, ‘but you must realise how hard this is for me.’

‘Believe me, I do,’ Slim said. ‘My wife ran off with a butcher.’

And it had been picking on the wrong man with a razor blade that had got him discharged from the Armed Forces and hit with a three-year suspended prison sentence. Luckily, both for his freedom and his victim’s face, half a bottle of whisky had reduced his aim to that of a blindfolded man thrashing about in the dark.

‘I understand,’ he added. ‘I need you to do something for me.’

‘What?’

He handed her a small plastic object. ‘He wears a windcheater when he … when I see him. Wrap this in a small piece of cloth and slip it into an inside pocket. I know those kinds of jackets. They have multiple pockets in the inner lining. He should never notice it.’

She held the item up and turned it over. ‘It’s a USB drive—’

‘It’s designed to look that way. In case he finds it. It’s a remote automated bug. Army-issue.’

‘But what if he checks what’s on it?’ 

‘He won’t.’

And if he did, a folder of pre-loaded pornography would see it tossed into the nearest bin if Ted had any shred of decency, leaving the tiny mic hidden behind the USB casing undetected.

‘Just trust me,’ Slim said, hoping he sounded authoritative. ‘I’m a professional.’

Emma didn’t look convinced, but she gave him a shy smile and nodded.

‘I’ll do it tonight,’ she said.

4

The following Friday, Slim arrived at Cramer Cove a couple of hours before he expected Ted to show up, having wanted to find a good place to set up his recording equipment. Usually he watched for Ted from an area of grass not far from the coast path, but this time he climbed a little higher and picked a grassy ledge which still had a view of the beach but was also hidden from the view of anyone who might wander past. There, with a waterproof sheet to keep off the rain, he set up his recording equipment and sat down to wait.

Ted arrived a little after two. It had been raining off and on all day, and Slim scowled as the weather worsened, threatening to disrupt his recording as the pattering of rain on his waterproof sheet intensified. Ted, wearing the raincoat, strolled to the waters’ edge and took up his usual position. Today’s tide was halfway up the beach. Ted was alone; the last dog walker had gone home half an hour before he arrived.

Ted squatted down and took out the book. He rested it on his knee, then leaned forward so his hood sheltered it from the rain. Then he began to read, and a muffled voice crackled through Slim’s headphones.

For the first few seconds, Slim adjusted the frequency control, sure he was picking up something other than Ted’s voice. The words were gibberish, but Ted’s gestures matched the rise and fall in intonation, so Slim sat back in the grass to listen. Ted droned on for several minutes, paused for a while, then began over again. Slim found his attention drifting as he struggled to make any sense of the words. By the time Ted implored in English, ‘Please tell me you forgive me,’ Slim had been studying the gently rolling waves for some minutes, thinking about something else.

Slim sat up as Ted stuffed the book back into his coat pocket. After one last glance out to sea, Ted turned and walked back to his car, head lowered. Slim began to stuff his gear into a bag. His fingers tingled, his mind raced. Something felt wrong, as though he had intruded on an act that was private and should never be shared. As he looked up to see Ted’s car pulling out of the car park, he knew he should give chase, that tonight might be the night Ted sped off into the arms of some hitherto unseen lover, but he was frozen, caught in his own riptide by the threat of what Ted’s words might reveal.

5

That night, still without making any decisions